In the early 90s, before Google (founded 1998) and Facebook (2004), the Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland popularised a term that described the post-baby boom generation: Generation X. But kids today aren't slackers, they're geeks, and it's clear that new terminology is needed for a new generation.

So it is that Zadie Smith, writing in the New York Review of Books, describes "2.0 people". These are the children of the internet who came of age with the social web and to whom concepts such as "privacy" are just plain alien. But credit where credit's due.

"You can't help feel a little swell of pride in this 2.0 generation," writes the novelist. "They've spent a decade being berated for not making the right sorts of paintings or novels or music or politics. Turns out the brightest 2.0 kids have been doing something else extraordinary. They've been making a world."

Chief architect of this world could well be Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year old founder of Facebook and hero, or anti-hero, of a new movie, The Social Network. It's this film, its qualities, but also its truthfulness to its subject, that Smith explores. The problem is that "this is a movie about 2.0 people made by 1.0 people (Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher, 49 and 48 respectively)".

Smith is not the first person to make the point that the West Wing screenwriter and his director accomplice could really have been making a film about anything, it just happened that Facebook was their subject. This means they ascribe very 1.0 motives to Zuckerberg: friends and colleagues are left in his wake as he ruthlessly forges onwards, driven by the promise of wealth almost unimaginable, if not by his desire – yes, that old trope – finally to get his girl.

It's none too convenient that in real life Zuckerberg has been dating, with one brief interval, the same woman since 2003, so the film-makers omit to mention as much. So what did drive Zuckerberg? As Smith wonders: "Is it possible he just loves programming?"

Other commentators have been harsher yet: writing in the New Republic, Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig has argued that Fincher and Sorkin have missed the significance of Zuckerberg's achievement entirely: "This is like a film about the atomic bomb which never even introduces the idea that an explosion produced through atomic fission is importantly different from an explosion produced by dynamite." For them, the open internet, the platform which allowed Facebook to flourish, is the real hero of this story.

Where Smith differs from Lessig and others is that she's not a whole-hearted cheerleader for this technological revolution. "I must be in Mark Zuckerberg's generation," she writes, "there are only nine years between us – but somehow it doesn't feel that way." For all the many good things the web has brought us, why is there that nagging feeling that it just can't be right to live our whole lives on Facebook? Smith, who is 35, quit using the site two months after she joined it, concerned that it is "falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous".

To buttress her suspicions, the White Teeth author, born in north-west London, now a professor of fiction at New York University, calls on Jaron Lanier, author of the recent book You Are Not a Gadget. In this, the celebrated techno hippy writes convincingly about the perils of software "lock-in": this is the process by which quickly, often poorly, conceived examples of design end up as the bedrock of far bigger programming systems – nay, of our lives as we now lead them.

Facebook was designed by a college sophomore; for its 500 million users, it is now, in Smith's phrase, their "beloved interface with reality". Which is creepy.